The agreement between the black and red federal cabinet on the planned care reform should be on the table on Wednesday. But in the past few days the signs have pointed more towards discord than compromise. Now both coalition partners are convinced that something will happen with the joint decision.
“To say it very clearly: We need and we want this care reform, and we would like to see it in the cabinet on Wednesday,” said SPD parliamentary group deputy Dagmar Schmidt to the Rheinische Post. This was also confirmed by the health policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Christos Pantazis, in the joint morning magazine of ARD and ZDF. He clearly rejects the fact that his party came around the corner too late with its criticism. “We expressed a significant need for advice right from the start, even at the beginning of June,” emphasized Pantazis.
Federal Health Minister Carsten Linnemann from the CDU had previously emphasized that he expected a cabinet decision to be made according to schedule.
To ensure that the joint vote for the reform works, the leaders of both coalition partners met again yesterday in the Chancellery. But nothing was known about the result.
SPD insists on demands
SPD parliamentary group vice-president Schmidt warned: "In our understanding, reform does not mean crossing out catalogs with a sharp pencil." Rather, it means “fundamentally rearranging things instead of just cutting services.”
At the end of last week, the SPD threatened to block the reform plans if they only included “a pure package of cuts,” as parliamentary group leader Matthias Miersch put it. Changes need to be made - and the Social Democrats also immediately provided suggestions as to what these should look like.
First: combat the “fairness problem” between private and statutory long-term care insurance. Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) finally admitted this himself. “We are happy to take him at his word: the time is ripe for a common system or at least a fair financial balance between the two systems,” urged parliamentary group deputy Schmidt again.
Second: a care cost cap. This is intended to limit the expenditure on the so-called facility-wide personal contribution that those in need of care have to pay themselves. But at the weekend Linnemann had already doubted in the “Report from Berlin” that this calculation would work. A cost cap does not offer a solution for him.
The German Association of Cities has now also spoken out in favor of limiting personal contributions for inpatient care. Municipalities are already often a kind of “substitute care insurance” because they step in when those in need of care or their relatives can no longer shoulder the costs alone, warned managing director Christian Schuchardt in the Rheinische Post.
German Nursing Council sees a need for change
So there is still a need to speak a day before the planned cabinet decision. And this is under increasing pressure from outside: While the nursing care funds themselves warn that there is a risk of a deficit of around 4.4 billion euros by the end of the year, the German Nursing Council is insisting on comprehensive changes to the draft presented. Association President Christine Vogler listed several points of criticism to the Editorial Network Germany: "the higher hurdles in accessing care levels and the planned deletion of the relief amount for care level 1" and the suspension of adherence to collective bargaining agreements when employed in care.
Vogler also called for the training of nursing specialists to be financed through tax revenue. To date, these costs have also been covered by the personal contribution paid by those in need of care.
The social association VdK also sees it as positive that the debate about care reform is “gaining momentum again”. In order to create a little more financial leeway, VdK President Verena Bentele supported a request from CDU Minister Linnemann to the SPD-led Finance Ministry. This should reimburse the money that the startup borrowed from the nursing care funds during the corona pandemic to finance emergency aid - according to Linnemann, at least around five billion euros.
